On May 28, George Tenet delivered for the Bush administration. Nearly two months had passed since the fall of Baghdad. U.S. forces had turned up no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, raising the specter of gross misjudgment on the part of the U.S. intelligence community and allegations of presidential dishonesty. But, that day, the CIA announced that two trailers found in northern Iraq the previous month were actually mobile biological-agent production facilities. "Coalition forces have uncovered the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program," the CIA declared in a white paper immediately posted on its website. Within two days, President Bush was claiming vindication: "For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong; we found them."
Almost immediately, the story began to unravel. On June 2, the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), analyzed the white paper and declared its findings premature. Within a month, The New York Times has reported, engineering experts from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that the most likely use for the trailers was to produce hydrogen, not bioweapons. Experts at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington arms-control think tank, reached a similar conclusion, though the military did not permit them direct access to the trailers. In late spring, David Albright, a former Iraq arms inspector who founded the institute, was told by Mahdi Obeidi--the Iraqi nuclear scientist who made international headlines in June when he offered up components of a gas centrifuge buried for more than a decade in his backyard--that the discovered trucks did not conform to the designs of Iraq's bioweapons program. According to Obeidi, the Iraqi fermenters for biological agents were stainless steel; yet the truck's fermenters had an exterior of galvanized steel.
Experts from around the world soon pointed out other flaws in the CIA's analysis. The trailers had canvas exteriors, which would have resulted in considerable downwind contamination had they been used to handle virulent biological agents. Yet no evidence of these agents has been found. The trailers also lacked autoclaves and other equipment for steam sterilization, an omission that would have risked contaminating the system. The pipes in the trailer were connected with threaded fittings or bolted flanges, though bio-production requires welding pipes together to prevent microorganisms from seeping through. Expressing a common sentiment, Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), says that the white paper is "not about laying out all the facts and reaching a reasoned judgment. It is a piece of advocacy."
Indeed, both the conclusions about the trailers and the process that produced them closely resemble other CIA intelligence fiascos during the last seven years: the controversial targeting of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan as a chemical weapons plant in August 1998, the release of a revised National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the ballistic missile threat to the United States in 1999, and the NIE on Iraq's WMD in October 2002. In each case, the CIA's official verdict did not represent the best judgment of the intelligence community--or even the best judgment of the CIA's own analysts. Rather, it reflected an apparent desire to please political masters on Capitol Hill or at the White House. And, while those authorities bear responsibility for their own actions, so does the man who gave them intellectual and political cover: CIA Director George Tenet. Tenet surely deserves praise for his accomplishments throughout the last seven years, among them restoring the agency's sense of pride and putting it at the forefront of the war against terrorism. But, at several key junctures, he has failed at what he described in his May 1997 confirmation testimony as the CIA's main mission: to "deliver intelligence that is clear and objective and does not pull punches." In that respect, Tenet has seriously damaged the agency he sought to revive.
A New Penny
While CIA officials have traditionally hailed from the New England aristocracy, Tenet is the son of Greek immigrants who ran a diner in Queens's Little Neck neighborhood. His colleagues and friends attest to The New Republic that his bluntness, sharp wit, and sense of loyalty are pure "New York Mediterranean." After working his way through Georgetown and earning another degree from Columbia, he went to work on arms-control legislation in 1982 for Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Heinz; three years later, Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy appointed him to the staff of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. When Tenet first came to the committee, he knew very little about intelligence--one former staffer describes him as "truly innocent, ignorant"--but he learned the job quickly. Says one former colleague on the committee, "He was no rocket scientist, but he was grounded in the political process, he worked very hard, and he had good relations with other members of the committee." Committee Chairman David Boren, an Oklahoma Democrat, promoted Tenet to staff director in 1988. That winter, Tenet made his mark by drafting a position on the Reagan administration's Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that was acceptable to both Republicans and Democrats. Then, in 1993, Tenet joined the Clinton White House as a national security staffer, where he drafted Presidential Decision Directive-35, which laid out priorities for the intelligence community, and where he also won friends among his colleagues. "It's sort of his chumminess," a former National Security Council (NSC) official recalls. "He gets really close to you, puts his hand on your shoulder."
As the NSC's point man on intelligence, Tenet had a front-row seat to watch the unraveling of the CIA. President Clinton had little interest in the agency. When a deranged aviator crashed a small Cessna onto the White House lawn in 1994, aides quipped that it was CIA Director James Woolsey trying to get Clinton's attention. Frustrated by his lack of access--and facing hostility from the Senate Intelligence Committee for his handling of the Aldrich Ames spy case--Woolsey resigned in December 1994. Clinton belatedly appointed John Deutch to succeed him and made Tenet his deputy. But Deutch, who longed to be defense secretary, was a disaster. In response to liberal complaints about rogue agents, Deutch made it more difficult for case officers at the Directorate of Operations (D.O.) to recruit spies. He put CIA Executive Director Nora Slatkin--whom many considered clueless--in charge of approving covert operations. And he sealed his fate with the D.O. by telling a New York Times reporter that, "compared to uniformed officers, [D.O. officers] certainly are not as competent." When Clinton passed Deutch over for the top Pentagon job in 1996, he resigned--to the delight of many at Langley.
That left another vacancy, one Clinton tried to fill with national security adviser Anthony Lake. But congressional Republicans, who had disdained Deutch, positively despised Lake, whom they blamed for everything they didn't like about Clinton's foreign policy. When they refused to confirm him, Clinton, eager to get someone confirmed after the bruising fight over Lake, quickly nominated Tenet, who had remained popular with the committee Republicans. At the time, recalls one administration member, "the big joke was when Tony Lake was shot down [by the Intelligence Committee] as being too political to be DCI [director of central intelligence]--and they're going to George instead. George as a political operator ran rings around Tony."
Tenet inherited an agency in disarray. Morale, especially at the D.O., which is responsible for human intelligence and covert action, was in a tailspin. Tenet's charm served him well from the start. While Deutch had tried to maintain a regal aloofness--bodyguards would shadow him when he visited the cafeteria--Tenet was open and friendly, dribbling basketballs down Langley's hallways and blasting opera and Motown from his office. Says Jeffrey Smith, who served as the CIA's general counsel in 1995 and 1996, "George is the first director in recent times that has really been embraced by the CIA family. Most of them going back to [Carter administration CIA Director Stansfield] Turner have had pretty rocky relations with the career CIA people. George is, I think, almost universally adored. ... [S]omeone says, `Hi George,' and he just brightens up like a new penny." Tenet radiated appreciation for the case officers and agents that Deutch had scorned. One former intelligence aide says of Tenet, "George is great at putting his feet up, chewing on a cigar in his mouth, and talking dirty like the D.O. guys. He fits in great." Robert Baer, a legendary case-officer-turned-author who irritated his superiors at times, recalls, "When I got into trouble--which was fairly regularly--[Tenet] would put his arm around me and say, `Ah, those jerks.' He could look you in the eye. He was a real person."
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